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The Party of "No"

Technorati and Me

Technorati is indexing me again! They had to make a code change to fix
the problem with my blog getting stuck in their queue. Kudos to Eric M.
and the guys at
GetSatisfaction.com
where they have "community powered support for Technorati".

Well, they're "sorta, kinda" indexing me anyway. It's on a 24 hour tape
delay or something. So I never get picked up by Memeorandum because they
pull from Technorati and Technorati has stuff I posted yesterday
listed as my latest blog entry. And that's old news to Memeorandum.

Wankers.

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Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies conducting criminal
investigations collected data on cellphone activity thousands of times last
year, with each request to a phone company yielding hundreds or thousands of
phone numbers of innocent Americans along with those of potential suspects.

Law enforcement made more than 9,000 requests last year for what are called
"tower dumps," information on all the calls that bounced off a cellphone tower
within a certain period, usually two or more hours, a congressional inquiry
has revealed.

The little-known practice has raised concerns among federal judges, lawmakers
and privacy advocates who question the harvesting of massive amounts of data
on people suspected of no crime in order to try to locate a criminal. Data
linked to specific cell towers can be used to track people's movements.

But wait, it gets better.

Carriers, following requests from law enforcement agencies, are providing a
range of other records as well. Those include GPS location data, website
addresses and, in some cases, the search terms Americans have entered into
their cellphones.

You have no privacy.

The police know everything you're doing. Usually even before
you do it. Because they're reading your text messages and tracking your
Google searches. In real time. Day in, and day out. Without a warrant,
or so much as even cursory judicial oversight.

With just a few taps on his
dashboard computer, before he pulls you over Barney Fife knows what you
had for breakfast, that you're fighting with your wife, and what time you're
meeting your mistress for drinks. He knows where you've been, and he knows
where you're going.

At least 25 police departments own a Stingray, a suitcase-size device that
costs as much as $400,000 and acts as a fake cell tower. The system, typically
installed in a vehicle so it can be moved into any neighborhood, tricks all
nearby phones into connecting to it and feeding data to police. In some states,
the devices are available to any local police department via state surveillance
units. The federal government funds most of the purchases, via anti-terror grants.

It's a power far beyond anything the KGB ever dreamed of. And it's available
to every beat cop in America whenever he wants it.